The Urban Lawyer’s Brief
On June 30, 2026, a fire broke out at the Jatiwaringin landfill in Mauk, Kabupaten Tangerang. By the time it was fully extinguished nearly two weeks later, the blaze had spread across roughly fifteen hectares — close to half the site — forced more than two hundred residents to evacuate as smoke drifted into nearby settlements, and cost local government an estimated Rp 7.2 billion in emergency response alone, drawn from disaster contingency funds because no other budget line was built to absorb it. Helicopters, army units, and volunteers fought the fire for over a week. Lawmakers in the House of Representatives called it a stark alarm on the state of the country’s waste governance, and said open dumping practices could no longer be tolerated.
It was not, in truth, an unusual disaster. It was an entirely predictable one. Every rainy season and every dry one, the same images return: garbage-choked rivers in Yogyakarta, plastic washing onto the shores of Jimbaran, smouldering landfills on the outskirts of Denpasar and Bekasi — and now Tangerang. Each time, the public reaction is the same — outrage, a brief flurry of cleanup photo-ops, then silence. What rarely gets discussed is that Indonesia has, on paper, already solved this problem. It solved it in 2008.
A Law Ahead of Its Time, Ignored for Nearly Two Decades
Law No. 18 of 2008 on Waste Management was, in its day, a genuinely progressive statute. It reframed waste not as a nuisance to be dumped but as a resource to be reduced, reused, and recycled — grounding this obligation in the constitutional right to a healthy environment under Article 28H(1) of the 1945 Constitution. Its implementing regulation, Government Regulation No. 81 of 2012, added teeth: technical standards for landfill operation, a hierarchy prioritizing waste reduction at the source, and a roadmap mechanism compelling producers to phase in extended producer responsibility.
Most consequentially, Article 44 of the law ordered every regional government to draft a closure plan for open-dumping landfills within one year, and to shut them down entirely within five — meaning, by 2013.
That deadline has now been missed for over a decade. As of 2025, roughly 43 percent of Indonesia’s landfills were still operating as open dumps, and only a small fraction met sanitary landfill standards. It took until March 2025 — seventeen years after the law was passed — for the Ministry of Environment to order the closure of hundreds of non-compliant sites, with the minister himself publicly conceding that little had changed in the thirteen years since the deadline lapsed.
This is not a story of absent law. It is a story of law without enforcement — and the reasons for that gap are structural, not accidental.
The Decentralization Trap
Indonesia’s post-1998 decentralization handed waste management — like most basic urban services — to district and city governments. In principle, this should allow policy to be responsive to local conditions. In practice, it has scattered a national environmental obligation across more than five hundred local jurisdictions with wildly uneven fiscal capacity, technical expertise, and political will.
Local governments are legally obligated to build and operate sanitary or controlled landfills, but many lack the budget to do so. Field studies of landfill operations have consistently found the same triad of constraints: insufficient budget, inadequate equipment, and no viable alternative site once an existing dump is ordered closed. Closing a landfill without a replacement does not make waste disappear — it merely displaces it to riverbanks, vacant lots, and the roughly countless informal, illegal dumping points that already ring most Indonesian cities.
The result is a structural bind: central government sets the standard and the deadline; local government bears the cost and the political fallout; and because environmental law enforcement in Indonesia is largely administrative rather than judicial, there is little to compel compliance short of the central ministry directly threatening regional heads — including, this year, with jail time for non-compliant officials.
Enforcement Without Institutions
Even where regional regulations (peraturan daerah) exist to localize the national law, implementation studies point to the same recurring failures: weak monitoring capacity, limited resources for inspection and sanction, and low compliance from both households and haulers. In cities like Makassar, landfills have been allowed to exceed capacity by tens of meters in height, even under a decade-old regional regulation ostensibly governing them.
This is where the legal problem becomes an institutional one. UU 18/2008 assumes a functioning administrative enforcement chain: monitoring, sanction, and — where necessary — license revocation. But most Indonesian cities do not have a dedicated, adequately staffed waste authority capable of running that chain. Waste management competes for budget and bureaucratic attention against roads, health, and education — and typically loses, because its costs are diffuse and its failures, until a landfill fire or a flood of plastic on a beach, are largely invisible to voters.
Extended producer responsibility, one of the law’s more forward-looking tools, suffers from the same enforcement vacuum. The ten-year roadmap mechanism under PP 81/2012 depends on producers self-reporting phased compliance — with little independent verification and few real penalties for missing targets.
What Would Actually Close the Gap
None of this requires new legislation so much as it requires taking the existing legislation seriously, with three shifts in particular:
First, closing an open dump cannot be treated as a stand-alone enforcement action. It has to be paired, contractually and financially, with the construction of an alternative — otherwise closure orders simply relocate the crisis rather than resolve it.
Second, fiscal transfers for waste infrastructure need to be tied to verified compliance milestones, not disbursed on trust. Local governments respond to incentives; right now the incentive structure rewards inaction, since non-compliance rarely carries a cost until a ministry-level crackdown arrives.
Third, enforcement needs an institutional home. A national law enforced through occasional central directives to regional heads is not a system — it is crisis management. Indonesia does not lack the legal architecture for sound waste governance. It lacks the standing institutions willing, and resourced, to run it.
The law has been on the books since 2008. The only real question is whether, seventeen years on, anyone still intends to enforce it.
— Farid Hanggawan